Why Outbound Phone Still Wins When Selling Gets Hard with Greg Casale

0:10Welcome to the Revenue Builders podcast hosted by John Kaplan and John McMahon. In this replay segment, Greg Casale, founder and CEO of Reveneer, breaks down why outbound calling remains one of the few channels that still creates real conversations in a market flooded with automation. He explains how AI-driven outreach has increased volume but reduced conversion, and why companies that commit to building a disciplined outbound phone motion gain an advantage while selling conditions tighten. For leaders, this is a clear look at where productivity is actually coming from and what it takes to build a channel that performs under pressure.

0:43Let's dive in.

0:48Yeah, we talked about it a little bit, or we touched on it. And a lot of people listening to this are probably thinking because it's like this huge influx of AI tools directed at replacing SDRs. And I'm sure you hear this all the time. So what are some of your thoughts of what the AI tools, current AI tools are going to do or future AI tools are going to do with respect to the SDR role and pipeline generation? Yeah. And obviously, this is a topic that I'm really interested in, right? I'm sure. If something came, it was like, hey, this is going to replace the SDR. I want to know about that. Here's the way I think about it.

1:27The first thing I think is, I think blanket statements and sales don't make any sense. A go-to-market for a company is a fingerprint. It's a unique fingerprint for that company. There's so many parameters to a go-to-market when you get into the size of company they're going after, the unique profile of the personas that they're trying to bring to the table, the value proposition, the product itself. So many things are different. So to make a statement that, hey, AI, you know, an SDR is going to be replaced with an AI is sort of dismisses all that. What I would say is if an SDR, let's just take a simple example.

2:07If an SDR is managing inbound leads and a B2C model, I would say, yeah, probably that doesn't need to be done. Right. Highly automated call centers. You have interested people who want to get some information. I would say AI all day long. You could probably take the human element out of that. But that's very that's not related to what we're all talking about here. When you get into what's called tech sales and you're talking about mid market commercial enterprise, the activities that an SDR is doing on a day to day basis. There is a probably a good chunk of that that absolutely can be automated.

2:48And it is being automated, right? I mean, if you think about, and there's a huge negative repercussion to this, but automation is probably what's caused more of the elimination of conversion than anything else. But you have SDRs and many companies that are just emailing, right? Because they've been told, we don't care how you get the meetings, just get the meetings and here's the number you have to get. So if you give, if that's what you're telling your team, then they're going to use tools that will automate and scale what they do up and up and up and up. Those tools are readily available to SDRs and they'll go ask their manager for that.

3:28They'll ask a manager, hey, there's an AI tool that can write an email for me. There's an AI tool that can, instead of sending 100 can send 1 ,000. All of these automations. And so this is what's happened is automation has caused this 10x, 100x, 1 ,000x in signals. And as a result, more and more signals going into the same TAM causes conversion to go down. It's simple math. If everybody's 10x, 100x, 1 ,000 the signals into the finite TAM. And let's talk about TAM, right? And for any company on average, nine to 14 % of the TAM is in market. That's it at any given time. The rest of them are on the sidelines.

4:12They're happy with what they have. They're not looking. So you've got nine to 14 % of your TAM in market. The companies that you compete with are 10X, 100X, 1000X their signals over the last only three years. And what happens? Big denominator, small numerator, conversion goes to zero. This is what's happening with email. And now the filters and everything come to play, right? Spam filters get ratcheted up. You get screening. Your phone says telemarketer. And now you put filters in to filter these things out. So now let's come back to the AISDR thing. Well, hold on. Let's stay right on that last thing that you said.

4:51So, you know, basically the spam goes up from the sales side. The customer has AI optimized filters for email and for phone. And so what does the future look like? How do I, as a sales rep, an AE, an SDR, whatever role I'm in, how do I get through those call filters in order to get to the persona that I want to get to? I think I know the answer, but I want to hear from you. Well, so let's talk about phone. And this is really, I mean, I can't stress. Okay. Phone outbound. Any company out there, you need a phone outbound muscle. You 100 % need it when selling is hard, but you can't develop it when selling is hard.

5:37It's a hard thing to develop when the market's against you. And we're in a period right now where for most SaaS products, selling is harder. I mean, if you're AI native, you could say, okay, you're going to have a little easier time, but somebody's still going to validate that for you. So we're in a period where selling is hard. We were in a period with the pandemic where selling was hard for a lot of companies because people dispersed and weren't accessible. Okay. So selling is hard. Outbound phone. Why is this a muscle that works when selling is hard? One of the first things is outbound phone is hard.

6:11And so I always say when things are cheap and easy, the lazy will gravitate to that and hey let's say let's face it right many in sales organizations are lazy i always say it's a it's a diamond right you have 25 of your sales organization are top performers 50 are kind of in the middle and you always have 20 that are struggling i'm not saying 25 that are lazy but you have 25 that are struggling and it could be for very good reasons, but that's kind of what you get. If you give tools that are cheap and easy, then people that don't want to do the hard stuff are going to gravitate to those. And hence we have this 10x, 100x, 1000x.

6:51Phone is not cheap and phone is not easy. Why is it not cheap and easy? Because if you don't train an SCR on how to do outbound phone, it's not going to work. You don't have enough time for that person to get there through repetition because we know what connect rates are, A connect rate can be 2 % to 12%. Average might be 4 % to 6%. You can't get enough reps to get good at phone without really good training. So you have to train. You have to hire people who want to do phone. You cannot hire someone with the expectation that they're going to do inbound response. They're going to do email. And then when they get there, say, hey, by the way, things are kind of tough right now.

7:32I need you to make$50 a day. It will not happen. That person will quit. So it's hard. You have to train for it. You need special technology. You cannot do this with a cell phone. I took a call from a guy that I know, and he said, I don't think we can use it yet. Right now, I'm using a kid that I hired out of college, and I'm going to have him make some calls to see how it works. I said, how's that going? He's like, he's not getting any connects. The connect rate's like zero. I said, well, what's he doing? What software is he using? He's not. He's using his cell phone. Well, forget it, right? The telcos got smart a long time ago.

8:07They're watching the profile of dialing of everybody's cell phones. And if the profile is call, hang up, call, hang up, call, hang up, call, hang up, then that number gets flagged as telemarketing. And that's why those things happen. So you need software. You need software that rotates the numbers that it originates from. And you also, you can't be robo spam calling, right? You have to, when you get a connect, you have a conversation. You don't say, do you want a meeting and then hang up? So there's a whole bunch of things to learn about the deliverability of dials, we call it, which is making sure your dials get to the end point.

8:44And if so, you can have valuable conversations with prospects. And here's the reason why as the hidden value of outbound. When somebody picks up the phone, you're immediately in a lot of conversation with a prospect that you were trying to reach. There is no other channel that works like that. Every other channel, if somebody responds to your email or they do a form fill or they click on your paid media, you're still probably three, four or five steps away from ever having a live conversation. Outbound phone, they connect. You have a live conversation. It might not go anywhere. You have a live conversation.

9:18You're going to learn something. So you've got to hire the right people, give them the right tools, give them the right training. It's hard. If you do all those things, you tap into a channel that cannot be hyperscaled. Remember, AI cannot make outbound B2B calls. The FCC ruled on this in 2024. Can't happen without big fines. So that channel will not go through this 10x, 100x, 1000x. So if you learn to make that channel work for you, It will perform, but it's not easy. It's a journey and you got to commit to it. And if you do it when times are easy, you'll have it when times are tough, but there's never a bad time to start.

9:59Greg Casale: Thanks for listening to today's episode. If you enjoy the content, please subscribe, rate, and review the show to help us reach more people. This show is brought to you by Force Management, where we help companies improve sales performance, executing the growth strategy at the point of sale. Check out forcemanagement.com for more information.